Daily Times

In practically all water-related meetings I have attended in Pakistan, I have seen people argue with each other, the way two Ocean liners would cross each other at night — miles apart, just aware of each other’s lights. It seems to me, that water, like life, is predominantly talked about in three registers. One is the economistic register centred on supply, demand and economic productivity. The second is the ecological register centred on questions of environmental quality, climate change and environmental risk. The third political-economic register is focused on issues of equity, access and vulnerability for the poor and the weak.

In my experience, 99 per cent of the conversations in conference halls and drawing rooms of Pakistan on water and politics are filtered through the economistic register. The implications of this register are clear. In the field of water, it is about increasing demand for water — officially for municipal and industrial use and for food production. In reality, this conversation is about horticulture in the Defence Housing Authorities and Bahria Towns of urban Pakistan, and the sugarcane, cotton and fruit production by the large farmers and the powerful. In this register, the answer to inadequate supply of water is quite simple — build more dams, call names to India, and promote corporate-based housing, industry and agriculture to produce maximum monetary return from the water.

Somewhat in parallel to the water sector, in the economistic register the politics are about promoting the economy and delivering services. And the key problem for politics is financial corruption. Ask any young person in Pakistan about intellectual corruption, beyond financial corruption, and in their blank looks you will have your answer. Most people in the Pakistani society simply cannot think outside of the economistic register. That’s why all problems must be reduced to the economic calculus, from Panamagate to suicide bombers blowing themselves up for money and Taliban being anti-CPEC! Pakistanis can’t believe that terrorists might be ideologically motivated — ideologies that they might share. Hence it must be about money.

Thanks to the westernised ghaddar NGO-wallas, perhaps one percent of the conversations on water are around the ecological register. Here, thanks to the urban-based NGOs such as the WWF, IUCN, Lead-Pakistan and a few others, a smattering of very articulate and impressive people have started talking in this register. If there is any resistance to the mega-project based water development ethos in this country, it is in this register. The plight of the Indus delta becomes exhibit A in the case against Kalabagh dam. The uncertainties of climate change become either a case for Kalabagh dam or a plea for more responsible water conservation, in this register.

Politically, the ecological register is nowhere, and for good reason. In the popular imaginary, it is, at best, the hobby child of the affluent urban elites and, at worst, the Trojan horse of the Western culture to keep Pakistan from developing. The ecological register frames deep and urgent questions of injustice, hunger and oppression in a technocratic idiom. If only we could sort out the stinking Deg Nala, things would be fine — or so the reasoning goes. And it doesn’t work and nor should it. The Ansel Adams and Sierra Club style environmentalism implicit in this register has no history in our culture, and nor does it have any emotional or political appeal. The questions of ecology in our context cannot and must not be viewed in isolation from the political economy that causes them.

Very few understand the political-economic register in Pakistan. In the water sector, it means conversations about upstream and downstream inequities at the river basin, canal and water course level. It calls attention to the plight of millions of Pakistanis living miserable lives without clean drinking water in the urban slums or small farmers whose water is stolen by large sugarcane growers. It pleads for the rights of the fisher communities to livelihoods and cultural continuity. But since no dollar figures come with this register, it doesn’t get any love in the WAPDA House or the provincial irrigation departments.

Politically, the occlusion of political economy by crass economics means excitement about CPEC — where we will borrow money from Chinese banks to pay Chinese corporations to build roads with Chinese labour for Chinese trucks — and somehow development will ensue in Khuzdar, or Kot Radha Kishan. That no such development happened in Khanqah Dogran despite being at an exit of M2 motorway for the past 20 years is irrelevant here.

The author is a reader in Politics and Environment at the Department of Geography, King’s College, London. His research includes water resources, hazards and development geography. He also publishes and teaches on critical geographies of violence and terror